With a background in Hacktivism, Net Art and Video Art, Guido Segni, aka Clemente Pestelli, (b. 1979, Italy) lives and works somewhere at the intersections between art, pop internet culture and data hallucination.

Mainly focused on the daily (ab)use of Internet, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combine conceptual aproaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional.

Since 2013, a daily-updated top25 chart displays the most influential internet artists based on the expiring date of their website.

Now updated and renewed, Top expiring internet artists is an ongoing fancy race for rats and a representation of the state of hypercompetition and anxiety of contemporary artists inside (and outside) of the Internet.

With a background in Hacktivism, Net Art and Video Art, Guido Segni, aka Clemente Pestelli, (b. 1979, Italy) lives and works somewhere at the intersections between art, pop internet culture and data hallucination.Mainly focused on the daily (ab)use of Internet, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combine conceptual aproaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional.In quite recent years he moved from an identity to another producing works, actions and interventions under pseudonyms, collectives and multiple names (Dedalus, Clemente Pestelli, Guy McMusker, Angela Merelli, Anna Adamolo, Guy The Bore, Umberto Stanca, Silvie Inb, Fosco Loiti Celant, Guru Miri Goro, Leslie Bleus, Luther Blissett).Co-founder of Les Liens Invisibles , he exhibited in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museum of Talinn) and art & media-art international festivals (International Venice Biennale, Piemonte SHARE Festival, Transmediale).Currently he teaches at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, directs the imaginary REFRAMED lab and he is part of the editorial committee for the project Atypo.

Friday 12th September from 6.00 pm at Pavillon Social in Lucca Guido segni will preview his last video work called "Proofs of existence of a cloud worker”, fully developed for the exhibition “Pics ir it didn’t happen “ at Hoc/gallery.

The video was realized paying 50 workers from the crowd sourcing Amazon Mechanical Turk platform which were called from different areas of the world.

The project "Pics or it didn't happen", developed specifically for the gallery, is characterized as a researching space about the three-points relationship between the web, image and reality.

The design that animates the screen is a readymade taken from the well-known Google Images and from others web icons that are modelled and warped from the artist.

So the project consists in letting fly the images taken from the most popular search engine, indeed utilizing the statement “Pics or it didn't happen”.From internet to the real world and again around, the images are passed, from place to place inside and outside the screen using the same ways that are provided to us from the web and the digital instruments. From a very simple thing as a printer to the various online services of print ondemand, arriving than to the necessary device video-photo.

BioWith a background in Hacktivism, Net Art and Video Art, Guido Segni, aka Clemente Pestelli, (b. 1979, Italy) lives and works somewhere at the intersections between art, pop internet culture and data hallucination.Mainly focused on the daily (ab)use of Internet, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combine conceptual aproaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional.In quite recent years he moved from an identity to another producing works, actions and interventions under pseudonyms, collectives and multiple names (Dedalus, Clemente Pestelli, Guy McMusker, Angela Merelli, Anna Adamolo, Guy The Bore, Umberto Stanca, Silvie Inb, Fosco Loiti Celant, Guru Miri Goro, Leslie Bleus, Luther Blissett).Co-founder of Les Liens Invisibles , he exhibited in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museum of Talinn) and art & media-art international festivals (International Venice Biennale, Piemonte SHARE Festival, Transmediale).Currently he teaches at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Carrara, directs the imaginary REFRAMED lab and he is part of the editorial committee for the project Atypo.

Pics or it didn't happen is a colloquial expression used by internet users to challenge their virtual interlocutor on a discussion forum or a social network, when his arguments require photographic proof of what he's saying.

This project takes part from the recontextualization as both a search key and a request to one of the biggest image-searching engine: Google Images. This one is, as every Google product, a very sophisticaed software able to investigate every dark corner of the Net to give users back the most precise visual idea of what they were looking for. Everyday. Even in this case, Google tries to satisfy our request for knowledge (as usual) with a deep list still in progress (you can see this by yourself http://goo.gl/onBNiN).

So, Google takes on the challenge (even without knowing), offering life paths and experiences thrown in the net through their images, becoming -unknowingly- an active partner in a very personal speculation about role and nature of an image, especially in the Big Data era, an historical tranche ruled by the conecpt of total brokerage.

The circular image

Therefore, project consists of organizing sort of a trip for that images (captured with the search query Pics or it didn't happen in Google Images) beyond here and beyond a screen. From the Internet to the real world and viceversa, using exactly the ways the digital world puts at your disposition: from a home-based printer to print-on-demand services to photo/video devices.

The resulting material will be hosted online on the platform http://pics.oritdidnthappen.com (powered by HOC/gallery) and will include a sort of non-stop streaming of visual libraries with all sort of pictures obtained that will be collected, modified, printed and then re-documented once again.

The Middle Finger Response is a curated selection of 300+ spontaneous self portraits of cloud workers I commisiioned travelling around one of the most represantive crowdsourcing platform: Amazon Mechanical Turk.

All the workers in the selection have been paid about 0.5$ in order to take a webcam picture of themselves showing their face, their context and, ultimately, their middle finger response.

It's just a cynical but sincere attempt to establish a dialogue between the artist, the public and the crowd dispersed through the new frontiers of leisure, labour and exploitation in the age of the big cloud.

In the Internet era the separation between labour and spare time (leisure) has become subtle as never before.

Chat statuses are one of the most indicative representation of this con-temporary condition: available, busy, away or offline.

"Leisure" is an ongoing time-based portrait of me, myself and the internet from the point of view of my temporary chat status symbols.

Once per hour, 24/7, a script posts archives and over-exhibits my intimate Google Talk status through the www.temporarystatussymbols.com website forming an abstract and coloured texture from which users can date back any moments of my daily life.